#Celerity: A Critique of the Manifesto for an

Accelerationist Politics

McKenzie Wark

0.0 You have to love any manifesto which gets to

climate change in only its second paragraph. It shows
a keen attention to the actual agenda of the times.
This is not the least merit of #Accelerate: Manifesto for
an Accelerationist Politics. It has at least some grasp of
contemporary conjuncture in which we find
ourselves. But the grasp is in my view, only partial. In
some ways its a rather old-fashioned text. Of course,
one is always drawing on the past to imagine a
future. But this process some would call it
dtournement, some would call it hacking has to be
done with a little more historical depth and breadth.
What follows, then, is a friendly commentary and
critique of #Accelerate. The numbering of these
counter-theses match those of the original document.

1.1 The widening gyre of the commodity economy is a

series of what, after Marx, we can call metabolic rifts.
In the division between exchange value and use
value, commodity exchange severs objects from the
matrices of their engendering. Only one side of the
double form of value is subject to a quantitative
feedback loop exchange value. Its vestigial double
use value or the mesh from which things are
extracted, is not so easily quantified. And so rifts open
up in the metabolic process. Rifts which political
systems borne of the successive eras of commodity
economy cannot even recognize as problems, let alone
solve.

1.2 Climate change is the most troubling of these rifts,

but there are many others. The problem with the
dynamic of the commodity economy is that the
struggle within it of subordinated classes tends,
among other things, to force the ruling class toward
substituting technology for direct labor. But each of
these substitutions draws in turn on more energy and
more material resources. The whole infrastructure of
the global commodity economy has by now
committed itself to the consumption of more
resources than may even exist. The ruling class, when
not deluding itself with various ideological ruses,
surely knows that maintaining a commodity economy
on full speed ahead can only worsen various
metabolic rifts, climate disruption among them. One
suspects it is quietly preparing for this, arming itself,
building its private arks.

1.3 Against this hideous prospect, its high time for a

new imaginary, a new space for thought and action.
Such an imaginary already exists, but in fragments.
The difficulty for subordinate classes is always the
project of the totality, the very thing over which they
have no power. Well, nobody has power over the
totality as totality any more! The biosphere is in
decline as a result of a mass of private interests
competing to chop it into bits of exchange value. The
challenge is to claim the totality, to open it, to put
modernity back in play as a space affording more
than one path to a viable future.

1.4 The ruling class would like us to imagine that the

neoliberal future is the only one. This term needs to
be challenged on a number of fronts. Firstly, this is
not a restoration of a liberal order. Its something new.
It was not a turning back of the clock to a form of
commodity economy prior to the welfare state and all
the other compromises wrested from the ruling class
by organized labor and the social movements. Its a
new stage, based on new technical infrastructures,
new forms of control. Secondly: what makes anyone
think capitalism was ever liberal in the first place?
The autonomy of the economic sphere is itself an
ideological proposition. The liberal economic sphere
was achieved through massive state violence against
premodern peoples and their ways of life. So: there
was no liberal capitalism; there is no neoliberal
capitalism. But there is a new stage of the commodity
economy whose contours are rather undefined
theoretically, and not least because the left buys into
the neoliberal myth as much as the right.

1.5 In the overdeveloped world of Europe, the United

States and Japan, class composition has changed
significantly. Manufacturing has declined within the
composition of labor. The pressure points that
organized labor used to have at which to struggle for
its interests are no longer within reach. Even if we
could shut down all the hair salons it would not have
the same effect as shutting down a strategic industry
like steel. Now that such strategic industries are often
not located in the overdeveloped world, the ruling
class has less and less interest in maintaining the
conditions of reproduction within the space of the old
overdeveloped nations. If your big investments are
not there, then why care about the health or education
of those workers? The old Keynsian solutions to the
current crisis would in fact work very well, but there
is no coalition of interest for them, and significant
ruling class pressure to use the crisis to reduce the
reproductive functions of the state. In any case, the
emerging forms of commodification take aim at
precisely the affective labor and informational labor
that the state usually still provides, in health and
education. The overdeveloped world offers few new
domains for commodification, so these old socialized
ones become targets.
1.6 The diffusion of commodity relations throughout
the whole domain of the overdeveloped world
fragments and renders more and more molecular the
points of conflict and struggle. Local and specific
forms of challenge arise, from Occupy Wall Street to
the quiet, passive Bartleby tactics of not doing
anything at work you dont really have to do. The
problem is finding forms of semantic glue to stitch
such actions together rhetorically. This need not be a
radical language, it just needs to be a plausible one. A
popular poetics of the open totality, of there being
more than one possible future, and more than one
possible path out of the present.

2.0 Celerity

2.0 Not so fast, you may say. Lets not get caught up
in too quick a dismissal of existing forms of theory
and praxis. While the manifesto form thrives on the
pure annihilation of the past, lets proceed will all
deliberate speed, but not too haphazardly.

2.1 To begin with: while the commodity economy

presents itself as forward-moving, even as
progressive, lets challenge that myth. It seems that a
large part of what the ruling class is now doing in the
overdeveloped world is cultivating and defending
quasi-monopoly conditions. Using the archaic patent
system to shut out any whipper-snappers, or to joust
with each other for turf. Meanwhile, what the ruling
class seems to be doing in the so-called
underdeveloped world is rolling out the old
industrial paradigm of the nineteenth century on a
massive scale. It encounters there in modified form
the recalcitrance of labor, and responds with the same
spectacular offerings, which are met with the same
boredom, again, on an expanded scale. The relations
of production of the commodity economy seem more
a fetter on the free development of new social and
technical arrangements, new kinds of future, than
their custodians. The commodity form itself is out of
date.

2.2 Theres something to be said for the thought

exercise of imagining where the commodity form, left
to accelerate according to its own one-track mind,
would end up. Its replacement of recalcitrant labor by
capital would become absolute, making labor
obsolete, like a vestigial organ. If only there were
enough energy and resources left. It might even make
not only labor but the ruling class obsolete. A whole
planet ticking over via silicon encrusting bits! But this
is only a thought exercise, a fatal strategy in theory. In
practice theres not enough planet left to entertain
such an idea. Besides: technology may have agency
but it isnt absolute. It is pressed this way and that by
competing class interests. Even when it seems like
alternate paths to the future are foreclosed, theres
always struggle, internal differentiation. Theres
always points that can be prized open.

2.3 Opening the path to other futures means

reopening the qualitative dimension of modernity, its
aesthetic dimension. This was the chosen terrain of its
avant-gardes: the futurists and constructivists, the
surrealists and situationists, the accelerationists and
schizomaniacs. All of which opened up futures that
have now been foreclosed. But: to make three steps
forward, two steps back. There are many resources in
the aesthetic alter-modern spaces of the past via
which to experiment with steps forward.

2.4 All these qualitative avant-gardes met their

Waterloo: the quantitative rear-guard. The path to
sustaining the commodity economy after the
challenges of organized labor and the social
movements reached its peak was a new kind of
quantification, a new logistics, a new mesh of vectors
for command and control. Initially it was crude and
dealt only with aggregates and proxies, like the early
computer simulations of the cold war. But what really
led to its dominance is the embedding in everyday
life itself of the production of the quantitative data for
its expansion to the whole of life. Thus, the qualitative
avant-gardes have to re-imagine possible spaces for
alter-modernities based on this transformation of
everyday life in all its forms into a gamespace of
quantified data. Just as the situationists imagined a
space of play in the interstitial spaces of the policing
of the city via the drive, so too we now have to
imagine and experiment with emerging gaps and
cracks in the gamespace that the commodity economy
has become. The time of the hack, or the exploit, is at
hand.

2.5 Here we can follow in the path of Marx, but not by

treating him scholastically. Rather, one has to
reinvent his practice: his use of conceptual tools as
tools, his use of the best empirical data, his
attunement to the struggles around him, his
deployment of the communicative strategies of
modernity itself. Moreover, we need to recover
Marxs version of the Nietzschian slogan: god is
dead. For Marx, history is not transitive. Theres no
going back. Theres only forward. Its a question of
struggling to open another future besides this one
which, as he himself intuited, has no future at all. So:
lets look not at what Marx says, but what he does.
Lets align ourselves, as he did, with the avant garde
of the times.
2.6 Theres little to be gained from re-hashing the
various experiments in twentieth century revolution.
Lenin and Mao have little to teach us. Their situation
is not our situation. The rest is moot.

2.7 Who are the forces for social change? Marx asks
this in his Manifesto. And his answer: those who ask
the property question. It turns out that putting all
property in the hands of the state is not the right
answer to the property question. Goodbye Lenin;
goodbye Mao. But the question remains a valid one.
Who are the agents struggling in and against the
emergent productive forms who can shape the
affordances of those technologies and labor
processes? One of the answers is: the worker. But
another is: the hacker. The worker is the one who
struggles in and against a productive regime. The
hacker is the one who contributes to designing new
ones, or at the very least populating the existing ones
with new concepts, new ideas recuperated by the
new property forms of so-called intellectual
property. These are the accelerators of modernity:
those who labor in and against it. These are the ones
for whom the regime of the commodity economy is as
much fetter as enabler. The relation between these
classes, and with other subaltern classes, becomes the
key tactical issue. An issue of not just a poetics of an
open future, but modes of coordination.
3.0 Futurity

3.1 The task is one of coordinating the latent energies

of a people bored with what the commodity has to
offer with the awareness of what shaping powers
remain to us to open cracks towards new futures. Its
not either or. Folk politics and technical politics need
to talk to each other. To do otherwise is to lapse, on
the one hand, into local and specific grievances, or
purely negative energies, or a refusal to confront the
larger picture of metabolic rift. On the other hand, to
ignore folk politics is also a danger, the danger of the
technocratic fix. Its to base decisions on a refusal to
acknowledge folk struggle and demand, but also
insight and information from the popular struggles in
and against commodity economy. What we need is
neither abstraction nor occupying, but the occupying of
abstraction.

3.2 Its a question of whether boredom with the

commodity economy will work fast enough, as it
spreads from the overdeveloped world to the
underdeveloped, to open up a new path before
metabolic rifts like the climate crisis forces the planet
toward more violent, disorganizing, and frankly
fascist solutions to its problems. Already in China
factory workers are starting to get restless. Beyond
that, theres only so much cheap labor left on the
planet to exploit. Meanwhile, in the overdeveloped
world, a rather novel regime of value extraction is
finding ways to extract value from non-work. Search
engines and social networking find ways to extract
value from activity regardless of whether it is work
and without paying for it. Its a kind of vulture
industry, parasitic on frankly successful popular
struggles to free vast tracts of information from the
commodity form and circulate it freely. But having
beaten back the old culture industries with this tactic,
the social movement that was free culture finds itself
recuperated at a higher level of abstraction by the
vulture industries and their gamification of every
aspect of everyday life. So: any alter-modernity
project has to bypass the expansion of the old
commodification regimes across the planet, but also
these curious new ones, dominant in the
overdeveloped world, but tending now to transform
information flows everywhere.

3.3 Of course, part of the old ruling class still insists

on increasingly repressive and global measures to
restrict information to the old property form, whether
of patent or copyright or trademark. But the current
productive regime respects no such antiquated
embedding of information into particular objects.
Information wants to be free but is everywhere in
chains. But it has in part been sidestepped by
another faction of the ruling class itself, which finds
ways to extract value from the spontaneous, popular
gift economies of information that have sprung up.
New tactics are called for now, to work against the
new forms of commodification as well as the old.
Perhaps it would even be possible to design more
efficient and useful technical and social relations, no
matter how lo-tech, precisely because they would not
require the cumbersome digital rights management
and so forth of the old fettered regime.

3.4 While there may be no going back to the old

Fordist models of production, the partial
socializations of the surplus that were the fruit of
struggle of that time have much to recommend them.
It really is the case that these socialist systems of
housing, healthcare and education outperformed
their profiteering cousins. The ideology of the times
denies this, but its the case. These efficient systems
are being carved up in the overdeveloped world for
no better reason than to produce inefficient copies of
them which enable the ruling class to extract a
surplus from something. Lets never forget: it may not
have been utopia, but socialism succeeded, in the west,
in these domains.

3.5 Building better futures will take all the technical

infrastructure we can get. But its not as simple as
repurposing existing infrastructures, all of which are
based on ever-expanding resource use and labor
exploitation as design givens. The first step forward is
to get out of either/or language about technology. So
much discussion either sees it as panacea or curse.
Technology, as Stiegler says, is a pharamakon: its both,
and everything in between. A technology is not what
it does, it is also what it might do. We need an open-
ended, experimental approach, a critical design
approach. Being for or against it is one of the old
problems of an unhelpful discourse of modernity.

3.6 One of the best of the socialist systems of the

west was publicly funded big science. Science was
always subordinated to national security and
industrial development goals, but it was not identical
to them. The internet was invented more or less by
accident. Most of the breakthroughs happened before
science was narrowly constrained to producing value
for the commodity economy or specific defense needs.
We need to recover a sense of the possibility of
science. Most of its failures were not failures of
science, but failures of politics. Pesticides like DDT
cause damage because of a failure of the feedback
loop from folk politics to technocratic decision
making. The same is true of so many toxic disasters
today. Indeed, one needs science to know when the
product of a science is being misapplied. Climate
science is the reason we know so much of applied
science in industry is causing problems. We need
more science, not less. Including a science of popular
knowledge of the effects of applied industrial science.

3.7 Even a little techno-utopianism might not be a bad

thing from time to time, to imagine possible spaces,
even if only conceptual spaces, like in the work of
Constant. But if we acknowledge that tech on its own
cant save us, then we need to be attendant also to
experiments in social technology. Horizontalism, for
example, as practiced in Occupy Wall Street and
elsewhere, is also a technology. Whether its a techno-
utopia one is embarked upon, or a new social
practice, one has to pay attention to how the social
inhabits the former and the technical permeates the
latter. Tech and the social (or the political) are not
separate things. The phrase the technological is
politically (or socially) constructed is meaningless.
One is simply looking at the same systems through
different lenses when one speaks of the political or
the technical. But among intellectuals, the social, the
political (and we can add the cultural) are something
of a fetish. Theres something tactically useful in
stressing the technical bases of all such perspectives.
Among engineers and designers, of course, the
opposite thinking strategy applies. Accelerating
technical evolution requires a conversation that is
sophisticated in such matters, and which includes all
perspectives, including folk ones.

3.8 There can be no return to planning as a panacea,

however, as it always implies asymmetries of
information. The excluded parties and their
knowledge, their struggles, always turn out to be
relevant. We need only look at the ecological disasters
of Soviet planning for examples. The challenge is to
coordinate qualitative knowledge as well as the
market coordinates quantitative knowledge and
better.

3.9 New kinds of quantitative measure can also help.

Lets use that weapon against the ruling class! But we
also need new visualization tools, new narratives,
new poetics. And ones which do not exclude folk
politics but rather include them. The question to ask
about any new cognitive mediator is: whose cognition
is it mediating?

3.10 The emphasis for an alter-modernity at this point

has to be on its experimental practices. This means a
synthesis not just of the qualitative and quantitative
dimensions of modernity but also threading back
together its critical, negative tendencies and its
affirmative, design-based ones.
3.11 All this calls for a gathering of social forces. It
requires cross-class alliances, of workers and hackers.
It requires transnational networks, spanning the
overdeveloped and underdeveloped worlds. Its not
simply a matter of reprogramming existing technical
infrastructures. Its a question of aligning the
tendencies which struggle within it at all its points.

3.12 It is no longer enough to say what an ideal

politics might be. Perhaps politics itself needs to
become an object of sever critique. Intellectuals like to
imagine an ideal version of politics, but are less keen
on the actually existing ones. Its a question of finding
the right job for those of us who talk and write and
dont do much else. Perhaps as agents of a low theory,
which tries to link up particular struggles, rather than
plan it, top down. Lets talk no more of what politics
ought to be like. Comrades, roll up your sleeves!

3.13 Certainly lets not retreat too far back towards

the secrecy, verticality and exclusion which got us
into this mess in the first place. Planning has its place.
Every economy plans. But too much closure just leads
to information deficits.

3.14 Neither the command of the plan nor the purely

horizontal participatory model works on its own.
They exist in tension with each other, and with many
other social forms. Lets play with a full deck of social
forms.

3.15 There is always an ecology of organizations, of a

sort. But the problem with the current one is that it
does not reproduce its own conditions of existence. It
destroys them. This must be a central object of both
critique and experiment at all levels.

3.16 Retreating to the mountain, equipping some

ruling elite with a new ideology and a few cognitive
tools only prolongs the crisis. Lets not dally with
the fantasy of a new prince of Syracuse.

3.21 The Promethean mythology of the futurists

might work for some, but a more capacious and
global deployment of the mythic stock of images and
stories is more what the times call for. Besides, what
happened to Prometheus?

3.24 The prospect of a future does however need

reconstruction. It might begin with a synthesis of
various strands of modernity that are now
fragmented into separate realms, all under the reign
of the commodity and its quantitative equivalence.
But such a prospect means nothing without
identifiable social actors. It calls for a popular, and
populist, struggle, in many languages, drawing
different modes of thought and experiment into
common projects. It may not need an over-arching
image or metaphor. Fordist models even in ideology
seem a thing of the past. The task is not political
rhetoric but an actually political one, of finding the
modus vivendi for different forces in struggle, acting
now with the utmost celerity.

4.0 Personal Concluding Thoughts

4.0 So: Two cheers for #Accelerate. But only two. It

successfully develops the provocative writing of Nick
Land, and to his left. But if Land is a right-
accelerationist, #Acclerate ends up being something
of a centrist-accelerationist position. It defaults to
planning, to the intellectual retreat up to the
mountain, rather than engaging with new forms of
struggle. Still, its reanimated futurism, its openness
toward technology, to thinking problems at scale,
these are positive features. What remains is to push it
a little toward a more left-accelerationist position,
without lapsing into the sins of the left: the fetish of
politics as the magical solution to everything high
among them.

4.1 To the extent that personally I find common

ground here is that #Accelerate overlaps with a
position I started to stake out ten years ago now, in A
Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP 2004) and Gamer
Theory (Harvard UP 2007). Those texts reflect the
positive and more pessimistic dimensions of
accelerationism respectively. I drew on different
modernist avant garde resources, the genealogy of
which I then sketched out in The Beach Beneath the
Street (Verso, 2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration
(Verso 2013). In short: theres other paths to the same
territory besides the strange one that wends from Karl
Marx via Georges Bataille to Nick Land. (Deleuze,
however, we have in common). Perhaps the collective
project is remap that territory, so we know better
what our options are in what resources can be drawn
from the past. Otherwise: damn the torpedoes, full
speed ahead.